Juliet Was a Surprise (4 page)

His walking breaststroke took him around one bend, then another. He could hear only the soft trickle of water against his neck. Above him, the sky's silence was pregnant. The sun remained hot, stern and instructive. He was still on course, a rightness he sensed but couldn't yet touch or see, up this remarkable channel, all the signs taking him to the spot where the light would shed its gauze, colours would deepen, and it would be revealed. There even seemed to be a slight current bearing him forward, and this could only be excellent. It was beginning to seem that all obstacles, perhaps years of them, had at last been overcome. He turned another bend. The green reeds, the water, the sky, his own body—none of them were barriers anymore. He could have sobbed with relief and gratitude.

Around another bend and, like God opening his arms, the reeds ended and the channel widened into a lake before him. He swallowed a guffaw and, shoes leaving the bottom, stroked into this new lake, letting it take him in, a pull of surrender. It was warmer in this smaller lake, the water silky and touching him everywhere, the genius of a quick and loving woman. Then he saw it. His breath caught, his throat thickened with growing joy. It took the form of a cabin, not thirty yards to the right, the only thing built on the whole lakeshore. A square float protruded out into the lake like a patio into a lawn. On the float, in sturdy wooden chairs, sat three. A trinity. They were in the form of women in their sixties. They looked to be
drinking from elegant wine glasses. He could hear their warm, knowing laughter as they discussed him, a music he knew he would hear only this once.

The water was so calm he could swim with mouth just underwater and nostrils just above. He was close. The one with her back to him threw up her hand in a wave. He wondered if they had expected him to come from the water. He wondered what he would look like to them. His sunglasses, his frog-kicking feet bound in dress shoes. Nostrils skimming the surface. He couldn't help laughing. He was just twenty feet away, blowing bubbles of laughter and moaning out his nose, and they were pretending not to see him yet.

Cake's Chicken

I
've seen two things science can't explain. The first, I was fifteen and in the back seat of the family car, my parents in front. We were turning onto our suburban street, and I remember the light had that rich, early evening quality. Then, so fast we could only flinch, from the other direction a glowing ball shot by at speed, maybe head-high, missing us by mere feet. About volleyball-sized, glowing with the brightness of fire, or the orange of reflected sun, it had a metallic sheen, the gloss of a liquid bubble. It flew soundlessly, following the dips and turns of the street. That's how it was exactly. All three of us yelped and turned to it, but it was gone. We shouted versions of
“What the hell was that?”
and tried describing it to each other in amazed babble, but surprisingly soon my mother started talking fast about something else entirely, her way of coping with things she couldn't accept and would deny to her grave. My father eventually drank it away—when I mentioned it only a decade later he didn't know what I was talking about.

But I remember it exactly, as I do the second one, Cake's chicken. I still can't explain what happened that night I turned twenty-one, a while ago now. Sometimes the word “shaman” brings it to mind, and you hear that word more these days. I
hear it and wonder if a shaman always knows he's a shaman. Or if he's necessarily good-hearted, or even smart. I wonder if shamans—or anyone who can work your mind like a tool—are confined to the hot southern lands or are scattered up here too, shamans unfocused and vaguely nasty, shamans masturbating at computers, shamans delivering your pizza, taking your tip with a deliberate stare.

Once I heard a social worker say she'd met “Rasputin in a group home,” and I wonder if a version of that is maybe what I saw.

Because they weren't the brightest lights, Danny and Cake. In my last year of high school, I remember being attracted to their clique of two. I was a loner, still am, and I was probably drawn by their friendship, the friendship they had for each other, ugly as it was. Danny was tall, a jock without a team, a guy who maybe could have done okay in school if he'd cared. He was wry and acidic before irony became the norm. When he smiled, his eyes didn't, and he was hard to like. As for his buddy, if Cake was smart he hid it well. He was big too but sloppier, with a gut. I assumed he was called Cake because of that, but then I learned his last name was Baker, so who knows. Cake didn't seem to care about his nickname, or anything else. He “liked to have a good time,” he said, which is maybe odd because I don't recall once ever seeing him laugh. He looked vaguely Asian, or maybe Mexican, and even slightly retarded, which is the word we used then. Rumour said he got violent without much reason. Probably I liked them because “not giving a shit about anything” looked like a bona fide wisdom you couldn't quite do yourself. Anyway, whatever magnetism
worked then wouldn't now. Cake's dead and I don't like where Danny ended up.

I didn't see them for a couple of years, until I was in second-year university and starting part time at SuperSlice. They'd both been working at the takeout pizzeria “way too long,” Cake informed me one evening in spring when we were doing the same three-man shift—one driver, one cook, one on phone and cash. It was a tiny place, always pounding hot, and Cake smelled bad as he rolled out dough, so I was wishing it was me, not Danny, on delivery. Also, Cake was the kind who worked hard in spurts to get it done, and I didn't like seeing the occasional drop of sweat course down his patchy unshaven cheek, bead on his chin, wobble and fall onto his work. But we were having a conversation, and it turned intense. He'd been going on about a problem he'd had with his health insurance since he'd turned twenty-one. Then he learned I was turning twenty-one that next Saturday and had no plans whatsoever.

“That's just bad.” He'd stopped swirling sauce on a pizza to stare at me. He had the kind of thick straw hair that could never look good.

“No big deal,” I said.

“You're turning twenty-one.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Your twenty-first.”

Maybe he dwelled in some kind of American-movie fantasy. The drinking age here had been nineteen for decades. You could vote at nineteen. You could join the army and shoot people. Twenty-one was meaningless.

“Gotta do something.”

“Maybe I will.”

“This is the
twenty-one
twenty-one.”

The two-speak was something I remembered from high school. They'd say, “You have to get her something. She's your
mother
mother.”

“So let's do something.” Cake had both hands up in fists, one of which gripped the wooden spoon. Tomato sauce dribbled onto his wrist. From this angle I could see that the scabbed cut on his earlobe was indeed what I'd hoped it wasn't—damage done by an earring ripped out.

“
Do
something with us.”

“Maybe I should,” I said. I admit I felt some yearning.

Cake said he and Danny were doing their annual camping trip next weekend, and I was coming. Bring a girlfriend or not, don't mind ours, he said. Trying to deflect, I asked where and he said the Cowichan River, it was a sweet spot, not an actual campground but a clearing at river's edge, a huge fire pit, a “homemade” picnic table. There was even a shitter made of an old chair with a circle cut out.

I mumbled how nice that all sounded.

His eyebrows were lazily up and his gaze steady. I didn't like looking him in the eyes. They were moist, and surrounded by pools of incomprehension and hurt, but they hooked and held you with a steadiness you didn't expect.

My stomach hollowed. Why was I scared? They weren't criminals, exactly. They probably did this sort of thing all the time, and apparently they survived. But I pictured smashed bottles and roars in the night, facial cuts, river-sized regret.

“I'm not much of a drinker.”

Cake pursed his lips for a fart sound that could have meant a number of things.

THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY
afternoon I was in my basement suite, trying out a rice cooker I'd bought at a garage sale and feeling fine to be turning twenty-one alone. My mother, maybe the only other person who knew what day it was, had called from Winnipeg.

But around five, the tiny red SuperSlice car pulled into the driveway. It sat a moment then honked, not sanctioned delivery behaviour. All I could see from my kitchen's little window was the car's grille and bumper, not the driver. I didn't know the eating habits of my middle-aged landlady upstairs, but I was apprehensive, and when another honk came, a long one, I ran outside to intercept Danny swearing to himself as he climbed the steps to bang on the main door.

“Danny!” I called, my hand up in a wave.

“Jesus, let's go, it's late,” he said, not pleased. He was bare-chested, with his red SuperSlice shirt balled up in a fist. There sat Cake in the front seat, red shirt on, not looking at me, head bobbing lightly to music, eating a slice he'd folded up New York–style.

Danny brushed past me and in through the gate, muttering about “getting your stupid
stuff
.” I followed him into my apartment, where he stood in the kitchen, arms raised in the air, eyes closed.

“What are you bringing?”
he hissed.

“I guess … I guess some blankets. We camping?”

“Yes, we're camping, and we have to
shop
, we have to buy
booze
, we have to
drive
and we have to set up a fucking
tent
. You were supposed to be at the Slice.”

I called “Sorry” from the bedroom. I emerged with my duvet and pillow, both of which I stuffed into a garbage bag.

“I don't have a tent or anything.”

Danny ignored me, watching the rice cooker.

“That done?”

“It needs a little m— The timer, I think, says fifteen—”

Danny unplugged it, wrapped it in his red shirt and tucked it under his arm.

“It'll keep steaming,” he said. “It'll be good.”

I told him it was brown rice, which made him halt and close his eyes again, but I couldn't tell if he was just being funny.

The hour-and-a-half drive began with a fight Cake and Danny had in the liquor store when Cake merely picked up some vodka and read the label.

“You don't want that,” Danny told him.

“I don't know what I want,” Cake said.

“Do I need to
list
why you don't want that?”

“Fuck you.” Cake flipped the bottle to read the back, as if it were vintage wine.

“You're drinking beer. Throbhead here”—I was Throbhead, apparently because I'd continued in school—“can drink what he wants. I hope he buys something pretty fast, because we have a fucking tent to set up.” Danny still wasn't looking at me. He was angry again because a store clerk had made him go back out and put a shirt on, and now his red shirt was wet and hot and smelled of brown rice.

I bought the best bottle of wine I could find with a screw-top, because of course I lacked a corkscrew. Danny bought a bottle of rum. I was perversely a bit disappointed when Cake settled on a six-pack of light beer, but things intensified in the car when, driving, Dan cracked his rum and began some steady sipping. When I asked why Cake wasn't driving, “He hates driving” was the answer I got, in a voice closed to any more comment. We were about ten miles down the highway before it occurred to me that these two guys were still on shift and stealing the SuperSlice's lone delivery vehicle to go camping.

Neither the car nor I would survive this, I knew. In the back seat, half-covered in torn sleeping bags and a crusty tarp, I wondered if this stuff would, or wouldn't, help with the fire and disfigurement when the crash came. I asked, casually enough, “So did work get another car or something?”

They were silent awhile, then Cake said only, “We been working there way too long. Almost four months.”

“It was a
job
job,” Danny whispered, mostly to himself, and he took a bluntly contemplative sip of rum.

Apropos of nothing, Cake told Danny that today was my birthday.

“Ohhh!” Danny said, as if this explained absolutely everything, and he found me in his rear-view mirror and gave me a grin and eagerly nodding head. When Cake added that it was my twenty-first, Dan bellowed and awkwardly thrust his bottle back to me, the car swerving as he did. I took it from him quickly. Not just to save our lives but to anesthetize what might be coming. Swallowing, I told myself it was just distilled sugar, Hell's candy, and what the fuck.

BUT IT TURNED OUT
they weren't heavy drinkers at all. Danny pretty much stopped drinking once he stopped driving. At the campsite, Cake sipped listlessly on a single warm beer. I was also surprised that no bag of green came out, or pills—at least not that I saw. Basically, like two giant children, they had a natural and unfuelled capacity for mischief and discontent.

After we parked at the end of a dirt road we had to hike in a half mile along the river, so it was good we hadn't brought much to carry. Danny got the tent up with a dexterous ease that had Cake merely watching from the sidelines, passing him the next pole or peg. Or sometimes not. Their style took the route of obnoxious sniping—Danny's “
That
one, asshole,” would have Cake fake throw it at him, and then toss it, cackling, out of reach—like boys half their age.

I did firewood, which was easy, hunting in the riverbank bushes for what looked like scatter from a flood, lots of nice-sized chunks there for the grabbing. Kindling had hung up in low branches, which was a good thing since we lacked a hatchet, or even a knife. The tent was crisp and clean, looking fresh from the box save for a burn hole on the roof the size and shape of a hot frying pan bottom. Someone had adorned the hole with magic-markered eyes and smile, so that the hole was a giant nose. The poorly drawn smile smoked a well-drawn pipe.